Thursday, 29 March 2007

Working in the new media industry I still find it's hard to get people used to measuring online success in terms of 'page impressions' and audience in 'Unique Visitors' (meanings of these below).

I find myself regularly (irritatingly condescendingly) correcting people who talk of 'hits', here's a definition of why hits are dead as a measurement of a web sites success:

"Hits: Requests for any single file on a Web server. A hit can be a request for a Web page or any element of that page, such as an image, a style sheet or an external JavaScript. Therefore, "hits" is a meaningless statistic for measuring Web traffic. A large number of hits on a website might mean that a site uses a lot of images or scripts on its pages, rather than that many people visit the site. "Unique visitors" over a defined period should be used to measure a site's popularity instead."

Measuring website statistics:

Page impressions are the number of individual pages that are viewed on your site.

Visits are the number of times a person or computer IP address is logged as having visited your site, regardless of how many pages the look at or what they do.

Unique Users/Visitors are all the individual visitors to your site, if they visit more than once it still only counts as the same Unique Visitor of the chosen time period.

Closing thoughts

Richard Kendall 2003-2009Disclaimer: The views expressed on richardkendall.blogspot.com are those of me, Richard Kendall and not of my employers. And I'm not responsible for the content of external sites and cannot guarantee that every link will work!